Day 6: from Paradise to Wyoming

Yesterday (Day 5): 

We enjoyed our rest day by visiting the sculpture rainforest garden of Sir Edward James, a rich British artist who applied his fortune to building an intricate and surreal and seemingly endless sculpture garden woven into a mountainside of rainforest. The features were made from cement poured into molds and were like Salvador Dalí or invoking leaves or flowers. Walking along the steep stone paths, leading from structure to surprising structure, was like exploring a true secret garden. Eccentric, magical, whimsical. I could sit in a nook and just stare at ferns and vines and strange man-made structures. I padded along agape, for two hours straight, and found myself lost or turning new corners the whole time. What an amazing thing to make with one's fortune. 

The eccentric and wonderful sculpture garden in the rainforest. 

7:20am today: 

Xilitla was falling behind us as we climbed up and out and onwards on Rt 120. The morning sun crested above the mountains behind us and made a straight bare rock face ahead of us glow pink. Leftover night clouds huddled in the lower mountains, but we were above them under blue sky. 

Sunrise above the clouds, leaving magical Xilitla.

9:30am:

We stopped in a little mountain town, Ahuactlan ("Ow! Cat Land!") to sit in the park and rest our legs and eat from a knot of cheese. This cheese is in the style of Queso de Oaxaca, and is basically string cheese tied into a wad. You grab off a strip and unwind it and it stretches and frays and snaps and you wrap it in a tortilla and find extreme happiness. 

Everyone was sweeping in this town when we arrived. The man in the gymnasium was sweeping. A woman in the park swept around our bikes. Two women swept outside the tiny library and then opened its doors. "I LOVE the sweeping!" said Ellie. We moved our bikes to the opposite corner of the park nearer to a shop and rested there until the sweeping once again approached us. A good motivator to get back on and keep climbing. 

The town of much sweeping.

We had climbed 2,000+ feet already this morning. Slow moving, grinding along each S-curve, witnessing the views of the mountain top shapes change as we move. One was a camel. One was a thumbs-up. Others were modern art, commanding and nameless.

If my ego gets in this and my thoughts churn as I ride: "my bike partner is so far ahead of me! How long and hard it would be to catch her up! Oh woe is me, how slow I am!" I might as well put this bike right back in a box and fly home. Scenery change happens slow enough when climbing that you can't rely upon it for a distraction and need to bring your mind into a healthy frame of being to keep sane. 

The Sierra Gordas in her many forms

1:20pm

After 4,200 feet of climbing, we gained a screaming descent. And we do in fact descend noisily, hooting, and with various versions of aiaiaiaiaiaia! The road bends and flows downward, I stand on my pedals and fly. This is the closest I'll come to flying. No, in fact, it is flying. Such contrast to crawling heavily uphill. My shirt flaps at my belly, the wind snaps at my face. I'm skiing a double black diamond, banking into the curves and gliding, zooming. I'm astride a galloping horse, running for his own pleasure without any spurs from his rider. My eyes flick ahead, checking rapidly upcoming curves, flick back to pavement directly in front of me, flicking out and back with each blink. All systems on high alert processing, surging downward. Oh gravity, oh flight. To see the road weaving along the mountainside cut, where we are headed, and to look back and see from whence we came. 

We stopped at the bottom and I found myself hit with a snarling wild-type hunger, a true weed of hunger, if you will. I'd been so narrow-point focused on my flight that the stomach couldn't even get a message thru. Post-flight service was immediately offered in the way of bolsa de beans and tortillas on a shady piece of pavement. 

Fighting the rare wild-type hunger

We are staying in the town of La Lagunita tonight. We left paradise this morning in the form of lush rainforest and enormous leaves and damp hotels and are now in what feels like Wyoming. Scrappy pines now are the landscape, the land feeling exposed and baked and dry. The mountains still tuck us in, but somehow it feels less cozy without the luxurious leaves draping over us as well. How amazing that just 50 kilometers away is that jungle richness. What a change in elevation can do!  

Wyoming 

Our hotel room is very neon green, from walls to curtains, and blessedly so are we. 

PS. While I write from an exotic world and foreign country, please, dear readers, know that I am not in a vacuum here. If current events should warrant me needing to come home to my family, I will return immediately. Unless I am called, however, I will continue to forge along on this journey and write as I go. My own mental health and self-care are bolstered by moving on my bicycle and being in inspiring places, and I can only hope that my finding light and adventure can help me share light with those I love most. 

Day 4: Tornado of birds and entering the mountains

 

Today (aka Monday) is only Day 4, yet it feels like a whole week has gone by, each day so stuffed and varied. This morning we did our first touristy activity, and visited the Cave of Swallows. This is the 6th deepest cave in the WORLD, reaching down to 500+ meters deep, and is so wide in diameter that ferns growing on the opposing face looked like only flecks. This immense planetary pore is home to thousands of white-collared swifts, who sleep deep inside at night and then fly out each morning at dawn for their daily hunt. Tourists gather at the lip of the cave, sitting butt-painedly on hunky rocks, to await the mass flight. 

Ellie and I arrived at 6am, via a truck in the rain, and sat alone in the quiet thick darkness next to the cave lip, which is accessed by clamoring down steep rainforested steps from the road. We could see nothing after our guide turned off his light and left us. I sat with this intense sense of unknowing, un-seeing, and anticipation. The rain stopped and the clouds imperceptibly became diluted. Slowly, other humans joined us and awkwardly positioned themselves on rocks. The clouds parted and revealed a waning gibbous moon and the white sweatshirt on one of the women glowed and we all turned our faces to the moon in silence. Moonlight is unlike any other light, at times expansive but also thin and mystical. 

Dawn came slowly, and before us an enormous rocky opening yawned into visibility. The sounds of echoey chirping emanated from within the shaft. We waited. I tucked my knees into myself to keep warm. We waited. More onlookers arrived. We waited. A few neon green parrots, previews to the feature film, if you will, punched thru the air, swooping to the cave lip and back down again. We waited more than 2 hours, divots drilling into our butts from the rocks. We learned later that the swifts were late because they wait longer to come out in cold and rainy weather. By now sun began to warm my back and I could see all the ferns and vines and rich tropical greenery that had been around us all this time. 

Then! A few birds circled up into view. How far they had flown to get up to the light! Then more birds. They grew into a great swarm of black flecks in a counter-clockwise tornado, swooping around and around and then off-ramping into the sky. To watch a singular bird was like throwing a stick into a stream under a bridge: where will it end up? Some birds circled dedicatedly over and over before off-ramping out of the cave, while others made an accelerated exit. The noise from their thousands of combined wings was exquisite and the sound of a community moving as one entity. 

Waiting on the edge of the abyss.

Birds off-ramping into the sky. 

Later that day: 

Here I am again, squatting on the side of the road in the shade, eating. Polishing off most of a bag of plátano chips, crAnch crAnch: "For what I am about to do, may I be powerful." We were about to begin our first ascent into the Sierra Gordas, heading to the town of Xilitla. To ride that first curving upward-stretching road. Until now it has been mainly flat. I was a bit "gordita" myself in that moment, actually, having enjoyed the first (and decidedly rare) delicious baked goods of the trip, in addition to some black raspberry ice cream. "Pan Canela" said a sign along Route 85, and without questioning anything Ellie and I bought two pan each. Soft, fresh, tender little muffin things, redolent of Cinnamon. I wasn't even done eating my first two and we were buying four more. Otherwise, dissapointedly, I have found bread to be unusually white and dry and tough here, or, impregnated with so much margarine you can smell the yellow itself. But these were manna from heaven. 

In fact, we had been riding in heaven itself. The mountain range on our right, banana trees and ferns and little homes with gardens and flowering bougainvillea. This was not a highway through flat dryness anymore. "The CAFOs and dirt lots were only to prepare us to appreciate THIS gift", said Ellie. We couldn't stop exclaiming over the road and the views and the verdant greenery of it all. Roadside shops advertised colorful gifts and shop after shop boasted "nieve!". Snow? I came here specifically to avoid nieve! So of course we had to see what all this nieve was about. Snow cones? Some sort of trinket? Turns out: nieve is ice cream in many diverse flavors. Could we get any closer to paradise? 

Farther along the road tractor trailer trucks were parked nose to nose. Dump trucks waited roadside as well. We were riding through a gauntlet of trucks as far as the eye could see. What a strange change of scenery. I felt very small on my bicycle next to them all. "Where's the party? Where is everyone?" asked Ellie of the deserted trucks. Then I observed a pile of oranges peeking from the open top of one of the dump trucks. Actually, all the trucks were filled with piles of oranges. Huge immense towering piles of oranges. Oranges by the tons of tons. I could smell the hot sugary citrus in the sun. Then we passed a huge grey complex with a logo of an orange on it, orange juice! I can say with true certainty I have never been near so many oranges before in my life. 

Orange load guantlet. 

So we began our first climbing. The road clung to the side of the Earth's bulge and tall trees draped over us. I used my lowest gear at times and thanked my bike shop guys in adulation for the smoothness of shifting. Looking up from the concentration on pavement and I could see the land dropping away as we slowly gained in height. My face was huge with sweat and redness and exertion, I looked not unlike an heirloom tomato. But I love views from above; I love the soaring expansive feel of them. The sense of knowing where you are, where you've come from. 

After climbing about 1000 feet (two Cornell hills worth, just under half of the days climb, which is a sliver compared with some days we'll be doing), we stopped and ate fruit. I sat off the road and gazed at the soaring face of vertical land rising into the sky. "I am sweaty and sticky and tired and I am so happy right now," I said to Ellie. I told her about all the silly workouts I did in my Mansard apartment this winter, the grey coldness outside and me doing high-stepping around the kitchen and wall-sits in the hall. The bleak January days in the over-crowded Cornell gyms on a stationary bike. How my love Matthew would come over and tickticktick, up the resistance on the stationary machine, "remember Mexico babe!" he'd say and I'd be left heavily pumping away going nowhere. 

But now! Oh, it was all worth it. To get up here on my own power. My knees cooperating, free of pain so far. My legs doing as they're told. Ellie summed it up:

"Brought to you by High Knees in the Kitchen." 

How mountains can be such formations! So many different shapes! Lumps and humps and sharp drops and gentle bodacious cleavage and bare rocky patches and, are those tiny specks cows up there? 

When we came around a curve and saw the city of Xilitla, perched atop a peak and centered in an out-pouring of sun beam, I felt as if I were seeing a city out of a Disney princess movie. We didn't even need to consult each other to stop, we just both pulled roadside and went "whoaaaaa". 

The little center of Xilitla town was as bustling and lit as midtown Manhattan, just stacked in a tall pile. Built on a mountainside, it was incredible to see layers of buildings in this way. The town was like a split-level house, but a town. A five-way intersection blended vertical with horizontal and bustled with people and dogs and vehicles and a solitary policeman waving his arms about trying to maintain some order amongst all the gravity. 

Xilitla, all stacked and bustling.

Ellie and I are taking today as Saturday here, sleeping in past 6am and lounging about resting legs and enjoying internet and coffee and scraping out the last of our beloved and endangered peanut butter.  

In raptures over a rare latte. 

We're being good about checking in with each other and taking care of our bodies. This exchange happened first thing this morning, after stretching and admiring the mountains: 

S: How's your hunger level? 

E: Not bad but I can feel it coming. 

S: It's like seeing a train in the distance. 

E: You know it'll be momentous. 

I am so grateful for her positive and wonderful company! We are having a wonderful time. 

Day 3: Mountains in view! Ciudad Valles to Aquismon.

I was sitting under a big beautiful tree, in a dusty pull-off, perching my sore bum on my helmet. I had just deconstructed a soursop fruit. Green, shaped like an internal organ, little nubby spines, white flesh inside like compacted cotton candy. Somehow sour, sweet, and something almost floral and cheesy all in one. Absolutely carnally delicious. I waved my sticky pocket knife at Ellie. "How can I POSSIBLY still be hungry," I said, "I just ate this entire fruit. A fruit the size of my stomach. And shaped like it too." 

And so we extruded out the last of our Bolsa de Beans onto tortillas and I ate a number of gorilla's handful of peanuts. I never cease to be both astounded and slightly appalled at how much food I consume when riding like this. Perhaps I am eating double or triple what I eat in my northern life. We were finally riding out of the flattest coastal terrain (Day 3 was Ciudad Valles to Aquismon, a short day) and were encountering delicious ups and downs. 

Day 3 Items: 

1. I learned that yogurt on a tortilla does not work very well. 

2. Found that green trees and grass and sugarcane are so enriching for the soul, especially after so much dust and cement. 

3. Saw parrots in a loud flock and they were colorful and with rudely clacky voices. 

4. Encountered two cyclists, all in jerseys with little fancy bike lights, and they called "tanto photo!" as we biked along, they wanted a "silly photo!" So we pulled over and posed roadside with them. Have a great ride! Enjoy your ride! It felt so rare and also rich with international community to meet other cyclists out here.

Yogurt for First Breakfast. Although by Second Breakfast we were eating out of the tub itself, for First Breakfast we still maintained decorum and I fashioned a bowl out of this orange. 

The autopista. Smooth as glass, mostly bereft of cars, and leading us out of Ciudad Valles. 

The Sierra Gordas! With chicken. Finally approaching close enough to deserve a photo. 

Relishing this empty road (an unnamed side road off Rt 85) and living fence posts as we ride a delicious day to Aquismon. 

A free public balneario and stream walk into the rainforest. Nearly deserted on a Sunday and we didn't even plan to visit. We were just biking past and it was too enticing to pass up. 

I love epiphytes! Hallelujah for plants! I am so excited to be around more than dirt and scrub! 

Ellie and I pose by a silly frog to cheer ourselves after brain-banging over some travel logistics.

The sweet town of Aquismon, the last town we stay in *against* mountains, hereafter we will be *in* mountains. 

Photos from Day 2: Ébano to Ciudad Valles

The classic riding view on Days 1 and 2, the scrubby lowness. But in the background: the first hint that we are approaching the Sierra Gorda range. 

Roadside snack, two cupholders for coffee and water, paired with coconut candy and banana. 

Early morning fog riding, Day 2. 

Green eggs and tortilla....huevos cooked with green chilies and stuffed into a hand-pressed tortilla. There are no adjectives strong enough to express my adulation to eat these.

Small and thorny, yet sunshine bright. Found growing in a park in the rubble. 

Where there is water, there is life. 

Municipal park by the river in Ciudad Valles. Couples sat together, young boys played in the algal fountain, and there was peace to be had. 

Ellie and I stood outside a bake shop and had a good chortle about this cake. "I like the colorfulness," she said, "but I think the blue with the cherry was a misstep." 

Day 1: Perhaps the Oklahoma Panhandle

After arrival into the tiny airport of Tampico (the smallest customs affair I've ever been processed thru), I was graciously brought to the home of Ellie's Dad's sister-in-laws' friends place (got that?), and was fed a shrimp empanada and given my own room for me and my bike in their sweet small house. Reuniting with Ellie there and staying with these kind people was so incredibly soul-warming. The next morning there was coffee brewed with cinnamon (delicioso!), eggs, beans, and avocado together with nopal cactus. We all sat and talked about roads and food and laughed about my bad Spanish and then their house keeper noticed the biscuit man driving his wares past and went into the street and came back with fresh tender biscuits for us. More breakfast! Delicious biscuits and enjoying good company made for a late start for our first day, but it was lovely to bask in it for a bit.

Today we rode 62 kilometers from Tampico (or: Tampon, if you're me and overheated and sun-punchy) to Ebano (or: Ebola). Leaving the city was all industrial grunge, cement yards and trash and refineries and dust. But pedaled forward and this faded into low shrubby land, ranches, lagoons and rivers. The terrain was flat, range-land mostly, and the area comes recommended on no tourist websites. We were the only foreigners, and definitely the only short-haired biking girls. I had a sense we were traveling through the Oklahoma Panhandle of Mexico perhaps, oil and cattle and poverty and closed non-functional bathrooms and heat and flatness.

So it's 1pm, the heat of the day, and the road is pinched narrow and flooded with traffic. Scrubby bushes leaned in at us as we kept a look out for trucks. Then: Pssssssssss. That terribly triggering sound of anxiety for bicyclists. Ellie's rear wheel. There probably could be no worse place to get a flat tire, on this monorail with no pull-offs. But there was a culvert with a cement roof over it, decked out with rebar, and we lugged the changing operation up there. Putting the rear wheel back in it's socket: "getting the back in is always the hardest", Ellie said. "Let's see if this worked", and she gave the wheel a spin. A glob of brushy grasses lodged themselves in the spokes. "Or not," said Ellie, almost laughing at the absurdity and continued inconvenience of the situation. Then I fell thigh-deep into a hole hidden in the big grasses and marveled at how positive we had both managed to stay through this. I love Ellie's approach, one of appreciating the absurdity of something, staying light and positive.

The highway crossed with another highway and at this cross roads we took a 3pm rest break. The place was a couple of clapped-together shops, a trash pile, and a covered bus stop. Utterly unremarkable, but felt somehow a timeless scene. People going about their days with no apparent rush or bother. Buses came and went, women in low heels carried grocery bags across the dust and pavement, teenage girls sat and waited for buses staring into their cell phone worlds. A little girl was bought an ice cream cone. Little boys charged up and down the sidewalk. A bony dog gnawed on a surprisingly hefty find of garbage, and a one-eyed cat with a striped tail wistfully watched the little girl with the ice cream cone. We two gringos sat on the edge of the ice cream shop floor in a line of shade and ate ice cream and frozen chocolate coated bananas, and were entirely ignored.

Here in the Oklahoma Panhandle we are staying in Ébano (named from ebony, the tropical tree), and who's municipal welcome sign noted it was the origin of Mexico's petroleum. It also boasts many beer shops, lots of truck traffic, and a hotel for us with a pool, potted plants, and rooms for $16. Nobody else is at this hotel, and there is drinking water and good wifi, and all is well.

Tomorrow we are both eager to head towards the Sierra Gorda range. I can't wait to have something rise out of the flatness, the challenging and compelling mountains, us rolling toward them with infinitesimal and steady gains.

Cactus with avocado! For breakfast! Delicious, rather like okra.

Me and my box happily arrived. 

The shirt-haired biking girls! The before picture of the trip. 

Classic view of our ride today. 

Scene at crossroads, sitting on floor edge of ice cream shop and watching the world happen.

Ellie, unruffled, changing a tire above the narrow unwelcoming road. 

Of Bikes and Boxes, or: Reflections on the Travel Experience

(Written in and over many various airports today)


Dear readers, are you familiar with the riddle about the chickens and the fox and the grain and the boat? Where you have to get all these entities across a river but your boat has a load limit and if you leave some entities alone with others unwanted consumption will happen.

Last week, amongst bicycle updates and cardboard box acquisition, I was reminded of this riddle. My touring bicycle (aka Greenie Meanie) and promised box were on the other side of town at a fabulously helpful bike shop. How lucky I felt to have that box--Mr. Bike had disinterred it specially for me from his basement--and how desperate I had felt before I had found it. I didn't have enough patience to walk across town, and I live car-free, so I just hopped on my trusty blue beater bike, one Fooey Bluey, and pedaled there.

Mr. Bike wheeled out Greenie and then carried out the box. "Where you parked at?", he asked. "Oh so here's the thing", I said, "I rode here on Fooey." So thusly I found myself across town with two bicycles and an enormous cardboard box. Walking home in multiple passes was a safe and time-consuming option.....

But I wheeled everybody outside, dragged the box out, and then tucked what I could of the box like a sail under my arm, mounted Fooey, and balanced my way back down the streets. I felt a decided tilt towards starboard, but righted my ship with some counter balance and we carried forth straight. I felt like an ant, rolling along with something twice my size.

Box left on porch, I then pedaled Fooey back to the bike shop. Time to bring Greenie home now. I drove a team of horses. Right hand went on Fooeys handlebars; left hand and the rest of me was astride Greenie. Giddy-up!, and we merged widely onto the street once the cars had thinned. Halfway home a friend leaned out his car window and grinned and called to me. "I SO cannot wave back right now!!" I called back all laughing and careful pedaling.

So you have this cardboard box big enough to fit a family of four, and you take your contraption, the thing that makes you fly and brings you so much joy, and you take off the handlebars and pull out the seat post and swear at the pedals and gingerly fit it all into that box.

My boyfriend Matthew, the ray of light that he is, had promised to bring me some hunks of foam leftover from a shipment to his lab to help pack the bike. Luggage handlers do not handle so much as lug, and I've cringed in the past to be reunited with a bicycle box all dented and holey. He had forgotten the foam on Monday, however, but assured me he would remember it Tuesday, and showed me the series of alarms he had set for himself. This set of alarms made me laugh so much I just need to share.

I'm ready to go to Mexico because I am ready to be done doing 100 squats every day. At the beginning of 2019 I made a little whimsical intention to do 100 squats/day until I left for Mexico. Which means I have logged 3,100 in January and 2,000 in February. (Good thing I didn't do them all at once!). The Yucatan trip last year was totally flat but the 2017 Oaxaca trip was mountainous and my knees and legs were insufficiently prepared, and I deeply want to avoid feeling that kind of anxiety, pain, and body-disapointment again. In addition to squats, my grey cold winter has been spiked with healthy gym endorphins and lots of indoor sweating. The journey towards the journey can be as rewarding as the destination of the journey itself, I'm finding.

When your card is repeatedly declined at check-in, then incorrectly charged, when you have to call your bank in the baggage line sheepishly, when all of this is to pay an exhorbinent bicycle box fee, and when your gift-for-your-host fudge is unwrapped and de-bowed by a security agent...then when Ms Ticket Scanner compliments your sharp short haircut, you just about want to kiss her. How stressors make accented the goodnesses that do come one's way.

I unfolded myself from the first leg of travel from the grey slushy Syracuse (ultimate destination coastal Tampico Mexico), and walked into the bright sky-lit sunny river of humanity that was terminal C of Chicago's O'Hare airport. A sign in the terminal for Starbucks advertised cold coffee brewed with Nitrogen, and I smiled a big smug smile to myself. For the next 26 days I will not need to think at all about Nitrogen: not plant %N measurements, not soil nitrate, neither N run-off, nor Biological Nitrogen Fixation. Definitely not nitrifying bacteria or fertilizer rates. No total N, no organic manure, no urea. I am going to take a break from the Life of a Soil and Plant Scientist and go ride my bike around some mountains. Hallelujah!

Reflecting on how sometimes all I want are my pairs of shoes to be neat and parallel, to make up a new recipe of popcorn flavoring (Thai curry anyone?), to be in my cozy home or up in my productive office. How life is when you see all day only things you've seen before, talk only with people you know and are comfortable with. When you know what to expect. How full of sweet ease and peace this can be. Or restless-making. And how it is to travel, to pry yourself off the couch of comfort and toss yourself into the seas of surprises. To be day after day in places you've never been before. To see only new things. To navigate a puzzling world that is not conducted in your native language. My cozy Ithaca life is enormously different from the life I get these next 26 days ... where everything from getting pesos from an ATM to deciding if I can trust a taxi to eating a fresh tortilla spikes wildly upward on the graph of emotional load. I feel I may appear outwardly all adventurous and brave but sometimes I feel just a humbled rowboat on a roiling ocean. I go forth knowing the lows can be intense and the highs soaring ecstacy.

Here's some details for you information-loving folks about this journey.

Bicycle partner: Friend Ellie. Previously cornell soccer player, world traveler, high-spirited, high-energy, and zany enough to want to join me for this.

Route: starting in Tampico, winding over the Sierra Gorda range, then hopefully to Guanajuato, and finally ending in San Luis Potosí.

Distance: 500 miles, or so, expected.

Timeline: I fly back to the north on March 18.

Why there: La Hausteca región (around the Sierra Gordas) is supposedly wonderfully diverse in plants and animals, and perhaps less touristy than other locales. The city of San Luis Potosi came recommended to me from a friend from Mexico. There's UNESCO sites in the region, and it seems not a bad idea to create a route just by stringing UNESCO sites together.

Elevation expected: something like 20,000+ feet of climbing (accounting for ups and downs) which sounds so outrageous I feel a little wonky even writing it out here.